To Be a Gym Bunny! Level 2

The Scott Pilgrim comics represent an idea so intricately tied to my existence that I am amazed I never thought of it first: life is like a giant, slightly retarded video game.

"Give me most of your money, Tamaki style!"

Actually it’s probably just as well Bryan Lee O’Malley thought of it before I did, because I suck as an artist and I would never have been able to make it cool like he has. Seriously, they’re wicked good comics. But I digress.

The gym is a perfect place to test what passes for a sensible belief system in my world. Today I did a fitness test. (If you want to know how diabolically I performed on my last fitness test, you have only to look at my last Gym Bunny post.) It’s a simple test: ride a stationary bike for 10 minutes at between 60-65rpm. The bike monitors your heart rate, among other things, and prints this information at 30-second intervals.
The gym instructor takes this little printout, slaughters a goat, puts the printout and the goat’s entrails into this big cauldron and from the resulting mixture scries your fitness level.
The score can range from 1-5.
5 means you are fit. You are like the Jesus Christ of fitness if you are a 5; like a Chinese acrobat, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber and taking for sustenance only the honourably nourishing wishes of your nation.
1 means you are me. Or an amoeba. It’s important you recognise that 1 is the lowest possible value. If it were not, my first score would probably be 0.8, but the machine is programmed to show you a little more love than that, so I am 1.
Today’s test I scored... wait for it... another goddam 1.
But before you slit your wrists in sympathy, wait for the good news. Apparently, I am on the verge of 2. Do you know what this means?

Level Up!!

I want you.

I can’t wait.

Make me a Playlist Competition!

Science shows: working out to music is a good idea. Working out in jeans is a not as good idea.

To my mind, two things are essential for a smoothly run gym experience: the first is a pair of

Adidas three-stripe pants (more on that later).
The second is a kick-ass iPod playlist of songs to get you going.

So your job is to suggest a song that I can add to my playlist to keep me motivated and going hard. It needs to have a driving beat and a fairly consistent tempo – the soft verse, strong chorus thing doesn’t work. I will accept any suggestions so long as they aren’t completely ridiculous like ‘I like willies’.
The person who suggests the song that works best for me will be declared the winner and showered with prizes! (of an as-yet undetermined nature)

To give you some idea: at the moment the songs that are working best for me are ‘Low’ by Foo Fighters, ‘Sweetness’ by Jimmy Eat World, ‘Rules and Games’ by Funeral for a Friend, ‘Jars’ by CheVelle, ‘Hysteria’ by Muse and ‘Individual’ by The Salads.
Because most people don’t have a Blogger account I will accept suggestions on here and on Facebook. Go bananas!

Rules
- You are competing for some random crap of my choosing. It could come from Smiggle, or the dairy, or the drawer of my bedside table. Who knows!
- Like Highlander, there can be only one winner!
- If, by slim chance, you suggest a song I already have on my workout playlist, that is a foul and you will be asked to select again. (There are only 50 songs on there at the moment)
- If you suggest the same song as somebody else, that song goes to the person who posted it first.
- You have until Sunday 18th October to make suggestions. Then I’m gonna need a couple of gym sessions to try them out, so I’ll announce the winner the following Sunday (25th Oct).
- Judge’s decision is final. Don’t start with him.

To Be a Gym Bunny! Part 1

Charles Atlas, my hypothetical man-fitness idol. Anyone else remember these wicked ads from comic books?

I have never been in a gym with the purpose of doing any kind of constructive exercise for my physical betterment. To me, a gym is a mythical place where people go to perform arcane rituals which somehow make them happy and healthy. There always seemed a palpable air of mystery about such places.
Unfortunately, at 27 years of age I find that I can no longer do whatever the hell I want and expect my body to maintain the slightly underweight but generally acceptable shape that I have had for the last decade. Hence, knowing that my previous exercise regime of incessant fiddling and walking from the couch to my bed was no longer doing the trick, I took the first tentative step into... the gym.
I joined up for 6 weeks, because I am a wuss. I have no idea how I’ll go with this.
The first step is to measure my fitness with numbers and stuff. I respect that.
Fun Fitness Fact: I have 18.5% body fat. I assume this means I am almost 1/5 made of fat. I remember hearing once that your body is 80% water. Therefore I am a wicked water/fat combination. That's straight science. This leaves 1.5% for other stuff, which I’m going to assume is, like, hair and fingernails. Yeah.
Another, more terrifying number: on a scale of 1-50 of fitness I am a 16. As a teacher I have to say that that, my friends, is goddamn unacceptable.
My blood pressure is 135/80. I don’t know what that means but, be honest, you don’t either. That act of taking my blood pressure made me feel quite faint though, which lead to a painfully embarrassing forced bonding session with my trainer while I tried to will my skin to regain its usual pigmentation without puking.
After a rocky start though, I got it sorted.

Stay tuned for what happens when I get unleashed on the gym by myself!

The End of an (Annoying) Era?

"Hold on, this doesn't taste like souls at all! I'm not eating this!"

There's nothing as soul-wrenching as watching a group of 11 year-olds worship talentless 'celebrity socialites'.
Me: "What is there to admire about this person?"
Impressionable child: "Well... she's really pretty and popular."
Ugh. Thankfully the spotlight has been shining elsewhere for the last 12 months or so. It seems like Papa Roach have the final word on the matter:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duuUnO6kxGg&feature=channel
Well said, boys.

I saw these guys in concert in 2004 and loved every minute of it, even though I wasn't a big follower of their music at the time. But I am loving what they're doing with the new sleaze rock direction.

I hope I don't get sued for this!

The Real American Hero

Why does nobody understand me? I'm so lonely.

G.I. Joe was not a bad movie, when you consider that the source material was a line of action figures. I liked watching it through the lens of someone who has gone from playing with the action figures during bath time (I had Storm Shadow. I was completely unaware that he was a) a baddie and b) Japanese. Sweet!) to an adult with a working knowledge of the ‘widescreen comics’ format, blending fantastical elements with realistic consequences, that obviously informed the film.
One thing that I couldn’t figure out though, was how the world’s most top-secret military organisation managed to enlist the mute Snake Eyes.

Here is how I would like to imagine it happened.

Recruiter: Hello, excuse me? Yes, you, in the complete body condom. Hi. I, um, have a business offer for you. We actually saw you on Youtube and apparently you’re quite good at stabbing people.
Snake Eyes: …
Recruiter: Right. Well. How would you like to join the world’s foremost secret military organisation? You will get to blow all kinds of stuff up.
Snake Eyes: …
Recruiter: All you would have to do is choose a codename, tell us a little bit about yourself and sign this form that says you are legally dead. That’s all. Easy!
Snake Eyes: …
Recruiter: We, uh, have some ideas for codenames if you’re having trouble deciding. Pulls out a list. So far no one has taken Daisy chain. Or Spastic Pup is still free.
Snake Eyes grabs pen and writes ‘my name is Snake Eyes’.
Recruiter: That’s your name? Convenient. Okay, so before you sign we just need to know you’re not, like, Hermann Goering’s lovechild or anything like that.
Snake Eyes: …
Recruiter: You know, full disclosure. Just anything you want to get off your chest. Like, is your adopted brother a psycho or anything?
Snake Eyes: …
Recruiter: Are you actually unable to talk, or just being a pain in my butt?
Snake Eyes: …
Recruiter: Man, you drive a hard bargain. I suppose we can get by with you gesticulating wildly whenever you need to communicate with the rest of the team, who will be relying on you to get them not killed. That should be fine. Okay, so you are in charge of combat training all our guys. And cooking.
Snake Eyes writes 'I cannot cook'.
Recruiter: Sighs. Great, now I’ll have to recruit someone to do that too! God.

The Case against Photography

On the spectrum of photographers I would place myself somewhere in the middle. I have seen some pretty rubbish photography in my time, and I guess with the advent of digital cameras now everyone’s a photographer.

On my recent holiday to Fiji the thing that I was most taken with (with the notable exception of my radiant fiancée) was the snorkelling. The sense of peace I felt out on the coral reef, a thousand submarine lives playing out around me, was incredible.
As I floated above schools of beautifully coloured and patterned fish, intricate coral and clear white sand I did think to myself, ‘I would love to get a photo of this.’ But because the camera that we had brought with us was not designed for use underwater I was unable to do so.
But let’s say I had been equipped with such a camera, would I be any happier now? The memories remain vivid in my memory as a result of the experience, as much as the sights I witnessed. You can’t take a photograph of spontaneous laughter filtered through a snorkel. Any photos that I had taken simply would not have done that experience justice.

My limited experience of photography is that, in many ways, it is a waiting game. Light conditions need to be right, the sun at the correct height to deliver that perfect shot or blast away pesky obscuring shadow. Maybe the wind is too high, the temperature too low, the baby blinked, that look on a face is gone. All of these factors need to be accounted for, managed, in order to get that perfect shot. It’s kind of like being a hunter, but without the messy result one would hope.
In a way, I would rather live life and have those experiences.
I don’t hate photos. I love going back through photos I have taken and reliving the memories. But the important part of that is the reliving of the memories, the experience. I have never looked at a photo and thought ‘that is a really well-taken photograph.’

I have a similar sentiment about music. There are some songs, ones that I really love, that I would never like to see the music for. The act of going through and deliberately learning the chords or the melody, breaking the song down into its component parts, would be doing it a disservice.

What do you think, Sarah?

Change is good. Except when it clinks in your pocket.

You know the old adage: a change is better than a rest.

I disagree.

Change is exhausting.
Change your flat, change your flatmate, change your girlfriend, change your job, change the town where you live, change your diet, change your underwear, change your priorities, change the channel, change your toothbrush head. Phew!

At least it is self-directed for the most part. Still, I should probably just ease up on all the change for a while. In school we call that consolidating. Or is that fallacious thinking? Maybe I should just keep rolling on and see where I end up. Who knows the right way to lie a life. I don't. But I should definitely look into it...

At least I can always count on one thing staying the same: Selphie will always be a big whingebag.

Pokemons! I Choose You!

I choose... ah, who cares.

Pokemon Platinum: the must-have game of the season.
I was pretty ashamed to get so much enjoyment out of Pokemon back when it first came out and I was about 14 years old. How sad is it that I still play the games now that I am a grown man?
Worse than that is the fact that I persist with the Pokemon series even though quite early on I gleaned one important truth about the Pokemon games: they’re all the same!

I can’t be the only person who has noticed. And yet, review sites applaud the developers’ ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality. I think those reviewers are just searching for a reasonable explanation for why they still enjoy this repetitive mass-marketing gimmick of a game. Incremental changes happen from one iteration to the next (what? Pokemon ribbon contests? Where do I sign up!) But the core mechanics remain very much the same.
But this is not even the problem. After all, how many great series have been ruined by ill-advised changes to the mechanics?

What irks me is that you can’t apply the ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mentality to story. Sure, themes, settings, re-occurring characters. That’s all fine, but the whole thing? Why is there even a Japanese guy’s name listed under story in Pokemon credits nowadays?!

Seriously, watch this:
Boy (or girl. Next gen addition!) lives boringly in small village.
He meets professor who gives him a choice of three pokemon (grass, fire or water only!)
Boy is tasked with finding, like, every damn pokemon on the planet AND at the same time becoming the super pokemon master of the world. This is the manga equivalent of winning the Ultimate Fighting Championship with the aid of a paperclip while simultaneously locating the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti in the undersea kingdom of Atlantis. Make something a priority, Professor!
Your best friend, and also hyperactive pain in the butt, vows to prove that he is better than you like all best friends and runs off to do the exact same thing you are doing. Now I’m no scientist, but if you have two massive tasks that you would like taken care of, and two fresh-faced young scamps to do those tasks then why wouldn’t you give them a task each?
Boy goes to all the cities in his tiny world, facing the challenge of the Pokemon gym leaders who, despite being the best pokemon trainers on the planet, haven’t mastered the concept of elemental strengths and weaknesses. How did you climb to the top of the competitive pokemon industry by using six pokemon made of grass? It takes one fire-breathing pony to utterly destroy you! The gym leader’s explanation for their ridiculous choice is that they ‘like’ that type of pokemon. You know what type I like? The ones that let me win! That ‘I like them’ attitude is not how winners operate.
Oh, meanwhile you somehow get involved in stopping some conspiracy haphazardly thrown into play by Team INSERTSCARYGANGNAMEHERE to kidnap every pokemon on the planet and have them print money or defraud the government or something equally horrid.
Having slaughtered the gym leaders, and demolished some plot to do something dastardly with Pokemon, Boy goes all the way to the Final Four – Four trainers who – despite having no gym of their own – kick way more butt than those lame gym leaders. This might be because you have to fight all four of them in a row. Then you become the Poke Champ or something and you win. Because you abandoned the ridiculous ‘Find all the pokemon’ quest hours ago.

See what I just did? I wrote the story of every Pokemon game ever, including any subsequent sequels. Some royalties please, Nintendo?
Would it be too much to ask that something, *anything* could change in the typical Pokemon storyline? But Pokemon is not about story. And they’re shifting units so what’s the harm, right?

At the end of the day, I tell myself I won’t bother with the next one, but I still do. I still play them. I don’t know why!

A Boy and his Blog!

It looks like things might be turning around for the Nintendo Wii. I stumbled across the news on a gaming blog that A Boy and his Blob is being re-released.
I remember playing this when I was, like, 8 years old. Good times!
It was about a boy who just kind of came across this blob thing from space (they didn't really worry too much about story back then) and he found out that he could feed the blob jellybeans and it would turn into a ladder, or a hot air balloon, or a hole, or all kinds of great stuff! It made no sense, especially when you consider how you learn that a blob from space even likes jellybeans. What old school games lacked in story they made up for in sheer ridiculous difficulty! I remember it being really, really hard. They don't really do that with games nowadays, but I hope they don't make the remake too straightforward. (Remember Battletoads!?) And I'm glad to see they seem to have kept that old sense of whimsy and haven't tried to 'grow up' the series. Like, I'm thinking you don't feed him a napalm jellybean and he turns into a flamethrower or anything.
The graphics on the Wii are looking great. Throw in some story and I think you've got a winner. Of course, I don't actually have a Wii, so... Hmm.


The original Boy (and his Blob) embarking on his poorly scripted original adventure. Back when kids didn't need wimpy things like faces on their video game characters, just a litte black dot to see by.
I actually remember being fully impressed by the backgrounds in this game when it came out


The new Boy. He has a Blob too. And a face! Spoiled!!

Space Bread

This week I found out that, according to an astronaut, in space you are not allowed to have bread because the crumbs float around at zero gravity into your eye!

Now that I am learning Chinese I could try and become a Chinese citizen, train as a fighter pilot, get on the Chinese space programme, boom! Space.
But I would miss bread too much.



Doo-doo-doo-doo, space bread!

On the Road... the wind in the sand in my hair...

I've been doing a lot of travelling recently.
In the last two weeks I can cross off Auckland's North Shore, Katikati, Waihi and Raglan as places I have now visited and escaped from relatively unscathed!

Personalised plates: they're pretty popular nowadays, and people are getting a bit reckless with them, in my opinion. Obviously there aren't as many options as their used to be unless we start inventing new, retarded words to put on them.
I propose that personalised plates, like the text messages of the semi-illiterate, are a kind of linguistic rorschach test. I will give you an example.
I witnessed the following personalised plate a few weeks back:
NDLGNS
I take it as a challenge to my manliness to try and figure out what these plates mean, so I put my brain to work. I decided that the car was owned by an IT company, and the plate said NeeD LoGiNs?
But I was wrong. And my wrongness incensed me, because my answer - to me at least - made perfect sense. So I sought a second opinion.
Having written the offending license plate down, I showed it to Miss D. She pondered for a while and came up with NeeDLeGuNS, which would be a perfect plate for someone who loved Halo too much.
What did the plate really say? iNDuLGeNSe (sic)
Obviously!